If Winter Comes eBook

She had rather a long nose and this pleased her, for
she once read somewhere that long noses were aristocratic.
She stroked her nose as she read.

Her complexion was pale, though this was perhaps exaggerated
by her colouring, which was dark. Her features
were noticeably regular and noticeably refined, though
her eyes were the least little bit inclined to be
prominent: when Sabre married the Dean of Tidborough’s
only daughter, it was said that he had married “a
good-looking girl”; also that he had married
“a very nice girl”; those were the expressions
used. She liked the company of men and she was
much liked by men (the opinion of the garrulous Hapgood
may be recalled in this connection). She very
much liked the society of women of her own age or older
than herself, and she was very popular with such.
She did not like girls, married or unmarried.

II

Mabel belonged to that considerable class of persons
who, in conversation, begin half their sentences with
“And just imagine—­“; or “And
only fancy—­“; or “And do you
know—.” These exclamations, delivered
with much excitement, are introductory to matters considered
extraordinary. Their users might therefore be
imagined somewhat easily astonished. But they
have a compensatory steadiness of mind in regard to
much that mystifies other people. To Mabel there
was nothing mysterious in birth, or in living, or
in death. She simply would not have understood
had she been told there was any mystery in these things.
One was born, one lived, one died. What was there
odd about it? Nor did she see anything mysterious
in the intense preoccupation of an insect, or the
astounding placidity of a primrose growing at the foot
of a tree. An insect—­you killed it.
A flower—­you plucked it. What’s
the mystery?

Her life was living among people of her own class.
Her measure of a man or of a woman was, Were they
of her class? If they were, she gladly accepted
them and appeared to find considerable pleasure in
their society. Whether they had attractive qualities
or unattractive qualities or no qualities at all did
not affect her. The only quality that mattered
was the quality of being well-bred. She called
the classes beneath her own standard of breeding “the
lower classes”, and so long as they left her
alone she was perfectly content to leave them alone.
In certain aspects the liked them. She liked
“a civil tradesman” immensely; she liked
a civil charwoman immensely; and she liked a civil
workman immensely. It gave her as much pleasure,
real pleasure that she felt in all her emotions, to
receive civility from the classes that ministered
to her class—­servants, tradespeople, gardeners,
carpenters, plumbers, postmen, policemen—­as
to meet any one in her own class. It never occurred
to her to reckon up how enormously varied was the class
whose happy fortune it was to minister to her class
and she would not have been in the remotest degree